Susanna Pelacci loved Gotham. When she was little,
Keystone was fine. She lived in a big house with a big yard, and with five
brothers, there were endless games of tag or touch football. Carlos gave
her a ride to school every morning, picking up her friends Karen and Drita
on the way. St. Ambrose had a bus, but their fathers didn’t like them to
ride it. They walked home, except in the winter when it was too cold, and
during lockdowns. Then Carlos would pick them up. The first time it
happened, Susanna was too young to understand. She knew she couldn’t go
outside, but none of her brothers were around to play with anyway. There
were lots of other people coming and going, but Susanna didn’t see much of
them. It only lasted for a week anyway. The second time lasted two months,
and by then Susanna was fourteen. She’d seen her father’s picture on TV the
year before, with the Keystone D.A. calling him “Joey the Bull, suspected
head of the Tenucci crime syndicate since the arrest of Francis Gizzo and
Tom Carrollo last April…” So she knew what the lockdown meant, even before
she saw the guns. Before her brother went away. And before the talk about
Karen.

Susanna had been brought up to respect her father.
Respect was everything. Respect and loyalty were everything. It was
during that two-month lockdown that they had their first serious talk about
the specifics. “Right and Wrong” was a tricky business. Who could really
say what was right or wrong in a given situation? Could she, a little girl
of 14? Maybe for the nuns at St. Ambrose things were that simple, with the
kind of lives they led, shut away in a convent. But the real world was a
tricky business and it’s not an easy thing to say what’s right and what’s
wrong if you don’t know all the circumstances. But loyalty—loyalty
and disloyalty—those were not hard to figure out. “If you and your
friend Drita are out together, and she gets into an argument with somebody,
maybe you don’t know if she’s right or wrong, but you know the way to be
loyal is to take her side, right? Because she’s your friend.”

Susanna agreed, and that’s when her father told her she
wouldn’t be friends with Karen anymore. Karen’s father was a rat. He was
disloyal. And that meant nobody associated with him could be
trusted. Karen wouldn’t be going to St. Ambrose anymore, and she and her
mother would probably move away before too long. But if Susanna should see
her before that, if she bumped into Karen at the movies or saw her with her
mother at the grocery store, Susanna mustn’t talk to her. She mustn’t
listen to her or have anything to do with her. Karen was less than a
stranger to them now. It was like she did not exist, as if she’d become
invisible.

Susanna had no choice but to agree. Loyalty to her
father trumped loyalty to a disloyal friend. The timing was awful, though.
With the lockdown, she was already so bored. She would have DIED of boredom
if she hadn’t discovered Vogue. And then Harper’s Bazaar. And finally W.
For two months, she devoured stories of the fashionable world: the best
designers, the best restaurants, the trend setters and mode makers. Gotham
was the hub of the universe, she learned. Paris, Milan, London, and Beverly
Hills were good too, but in Gotham everybody spoke English, they weren’t
casually-dressed skanks like in California, and the men were way cuter than
those pale English guys with bad teeth.

Gotham… Gotham City… Gotham had the best of
everything. And now she was finally here!

KWAK!

Oswald turned back at the woman who had bumped into him
so rudely going into Saks and kept walking without so much as an ‘excuse
me.’ Then he took a second look as she failed to run the gauntlet of
perfume samplers and was waylaid at the first counter inside the door. She
was quite pretty, in a far-too-young-for-him sort of way: petite with long
dark hair, she looked a bit like Raven but more ethnic. Italian or Greek,
maybe, or possibly Spanish. Quite a wiggle too—not a Gothamite. A native
would have breezed past the perfume girl without breaking stride, and if she
did get caught in a moment of abstraction, she would have taken the spritzed
strip of cardboard, sniffed it and thrown it away, not rubbed it all over
her wrist.

Oswald knew the type. They found the Iceberg
regularly, looking for work: hit Gotham from some Midwest Whocaresville like
Keystone or Topeka, thinking they had the look, style and attitude to pass
for a native. They stuck out like chicks in a nest of ducklings, but very
appealing chicks. Pretty, good-natured, polite even, once you got it
through their head that being a Gothamite didn’t mean foaming at the mouth
and snarling at strangers on the street. They made good waitresses, as a
rule. But not the one Oswald was watching now, he suspected. He could tell
by the way she’d whipped out her wallet to buy the perfume: that little lady
had a chip on her shoulder. She hadn’t brushed past him that way because
she thought Gothamites were rude. She was rude—kwak!

Anyway, where was he?

Oh yes, the Bat-bugs.

A pessimist might have seen it as a setback. Oswald,
Jervis and Jonathan had already broken into sixteen businesses, but now with
the discovery of the Bat-bug at Cardington Bakery, they had to go back and
check them all again. Jervis and Jonathan didn’t know what they were
looking for, nor did Oswald at the first two places he’d checked before
finding the bug. The waste of time always galled him, but in this case, he
was glad. He wasn’t that confident in Jervis or Jonathan’s abilities to
snoop around without knowing what they were looking for. Now that they had
a definite task, this second round of break-ins would be much more
productive than the first.

The Bat-bug was also iron-clad proof that they were on
the right track about the wedding. Clearly, Batman still had some
attachment to Catty and he didn’t like this idea of a wedding any more than
they did. Say what you would about the insidious Bat (and Oswald could say
plenty), he was neither crazy nor stupid. He clearly knew a good thing when
he saw it, and Selina was. She simply was—kwak! The thought of that
good thing throwing herself away on a civilian non-starter like Bruce
Wayne must be driving him absolutely batty!

“Good morning,” Selina purred, pulling the bedsheets
over her legs as she rolled over onto Bruce and pressed her naked chest into
his.

“It’s not,” he said in the same gravel he once used to
dispute her claims about personal property, museum operating hours, and
criminal trespass.

“It’s not a good morning? Damn, you’re a hard man to
please.”

“It’s not morning.”

He seldom slept this late. They’d already sent Alfred
away twice but…

“You’re so literal,” she said, nibbling.

“Stop that.”

…but he was a man. He had limits…

“Make me.”

“That’s how this started,” he murmured.

…and after a morning of marathon lovemaking since the
moment he got back from patrol…

“That’s not how it started; it’s how the third one
started. The first one—oooh, I love this scar.”

“Kitten, please.”

…he was exhausted.

“Kitten you ask for, kitten you get… Mmmmmmeow.”

“How did it start, exactly?” Bruce asked,
sitting up abruptly, Batman’s focus on the unanswered question finally
asserting itself now that his body let him get a thought in. “All I know is
you pounced on me in the cave before I could even get to the logs.”

“I’d waited long enough. It was almost dawn by the
time you got home.”

“In the cave. We have rules about that.”

“Pfft.”

“Good rules.”

“Hard rules,” she grinned. “Firm, inflexible rule—”

As always, she’d pushed too far and found herself
flipped over onto her back, arms hoisted into a borderline-painful danseuse
pin.

“Non-negotiable rules,” came the menacing gravel. “So
how about an answer, Catwoman?”

It was an anti-climactic story, considering.

She’d spotted the Batmobile.

It wasn’t date night. They weren’t working together.
She was prowling like always. Glanced down, and noticed the Batmobile
parked on Columbus. She looked around “like any smart thief” on discovering
Batman was in the neighborhood, and she happened to see the fight.

If it could even be called that. Eight Westies outside
the Downpatrick Carpentry Club. A few minutes’ workout in the course of a
night’s patrol. The details wouldn’t have made it into the log. His
interest was only in the former Irish Mob’s connection to the Falcone family
and how Anthony Marcuso fit in.

But Catwoman happened to look down while he was
brawling and, well, apparently she really liked what she saw. So she beat
him home and waited in the Batcave, impatience growing and…

“Mmmmmmeow.”

Well… It’s not like he had any pressing business
today. The monitoring devices were in place at six of the eight vendors
supplying the Pelacci-Marcuso wedding. He had all the data he was going to
get until the out of town guests started to arrive from Keystone. The only
other matter was Selina’s GeoSeek, which clearly hadn’t been
corrupted. Considering the picks it was offering—Classic Malts, Rangers
tickets, happy hour at Quesadillas—Bruce was quite sure it was accessing the
preference profile of a pre-Two-Face Harvey Dent. Obviously their GeoSeeks
got switched at lunch. The only question was if it happened by accident (in
which case WayneTech should introduce an individualization feature on future
editions, perhaps colored plastic frames to snap on over the chrome) or if
they were switched on purpose (in which case Batman would pay Harvey a visit
to determine if Two-Face was back in the picture).

So there really was no pressing business for Bruce or
for Batman to attend to. He could finish work on the ears for Selina’s
headset but…

“Mmmmmmeow.”

This was how to do it. In a way, Susanna had been
planning this wedding since she was eight, but in a more literal sense,
she’d been planning since Anthony slipped that ring on her finger. She had
it planned with the detail and precision of a military assault. She arrived
four days before the rest of the family and had her first fitting at the
boutique before anything else. They did a good job with the measurements
she’d sent ahead, but there were always little adjustments once you put a
real dress on a real body. What was the point in getting designer couture
if they weren’t going to re-pin and re-stitch it right on her body just days
before the wedding, so any last minute shift in weight was accounted for?

While they worked on that, she went to Fiorellos to
have them do a first run with her hair, and she got a manicure. She got
wild plumb polish with a hot pink diagonal stripe and gold glitter. She
would have to tone it down for the wedding, go with one of those milky pale
pinks. But that was days away, and she didn’t see any reason to be so
BORING while she ran all her errands in the chicest shops in Gotham! She’d
have another fitting and another test run on the hair Thursday, and then the
final one Saturday, so there was plenty of time to tone down her nails.

Next, she’d stop at Cardington to check on the cake,
the photographer’s studio to make sure he understood exactly what she
wanted, the hotel to make sure they understood exactly what she
wanted, and then pick up Anthony to go to St. Swithuns and meet with Father
Ercolani…

Jonathan Crane watched the girl who’d bumped into him
so clumsily coming out of the hair salon. She was very pretty—not something
he normally noticed, but she looked a little like Raven. He wondered if she
had the same delightful scream. He would never forget that night a lizard
found its way into the Iceberg and perched on Raven’s podium. What a
screech! What a howl of primal terror! Jonathan wasn’t really drawn to
women, not as a rule, but… that wail of pure abandon to her own fright, she
was something special.

But he really mustn’t let himself get distracted. Not
with such an opportunity before him: Batman didn’t like the idea of this
wedding any more than the Rogues. That was suggestive. Oswald was such a
fool “We really should consider if there is added profit potential in that
information—kwak!” As if everything came down to money. Kwak,
indeed. Fear! That was the only real power. Look at all Wayne’s millions,
what could he do with them if The Scarecrow made him afraid of the very air
that he breathed?

Batman was keeping his Bat-eyes on the preparations for
Selina’s wedding. What did that tell them about their enemy, hm? That was
the question to be asking. The Batman feared loss. Loss of the
woman? Or loss of control, loss of the possibility… the loss of
Hope. He didn’t have Selina at the moment, she was with Wayne, but that
never impelled him to act. Why? Because Batman was a schemer, obsessed
with control, with move and countermove, contingencies and
possibilities. Unless she said “I do,” the possibility still existed.
That’s what he cared about. He didn’t care about her; he simply rejected
the idea of a definite “No.” He wanted her to be available to him, whether
he picked up the option or not. Yes, that fit. The loss of control, to be
removed from the ranks against his will…

Jonathan grinned wide at the possibilities and checked
the operating hours on the door of the salon… What if they wrecked the
Kyle-Wayne nuptials and laid the blame on Batman’s door? What then? Selina
could go after him. She would remain as she was, just as they all
wanted, but Batman would still be dealt that loss of control he so feared.
Removed from the ranks against his will! Yes, that would serve him right,
that would get under his skin… The salon would be open for another hour.
Then he could slip inside and see if a Bat-bug was to be found on the
premises.

She knew Joker had a perfectly ridiculous fixation on
Bruce Wayne, so she could understand when Harley got back from Arkham saying
the wedding was bigger news than “that Weiner guy tweeting his weiner.”
Harley didn’t distinguish between Joker and “the whole world,” so if Joker
was talking about something (and “that Weiner guy’s weiner” had to be
Joker), then to Harley’s view, the whole world was talking. But her Arkham
visit was days ago. What she was babbling now had nothing to do with Joker.

“I ran into Scarecrow at the White Castle when I was
restocking the Ha-Hacienda, and later Victor Frieze just happened to be
passing by when I came out from pickin’ up Puddin’s dry cleaning. It was
all they could talk about!”

“It doesn’t make any sense,” Ivy blurted. “Why would
they care if Selina gets married? It’s not like either of them ever had a
chance with her. The tenderest thought she’s ever expressed was warning
Crow before she set him on fire.”

“Yeah, if it was me, I’d have torched him on the first
offense,” Harley said happily. “Threatening ta set him on fire if he does
it again kinda gives him the option not ta do it again, and then how are you
gonna toast the marshmallows?”

“I just don’t understand,” Ivy murmured, ignoring
Harley’s blithering (which never made much sense anyway when she started
talking like Joker’s girlfriend).

Bruce Wayne was so utterly besotted with Selina that,
in the grip of Ivy’s pheromones, he’d offered her nothing more than a
Whitman Sampler. That was just… disgusting, but viewed in a certain light,
it was also sort of… sweet. A pity that Selina of all people was the object
of such devotion, but the whole episode did, sort of, in a backhanded way,
remind Ivy of Two-Face. That time they were fighting and he thought she was
using her pheromones on him when she hadn’t done a thing. The way she’d
never needed to use them because, all on his own, he decided to—

“Red! The palm tree is picking on me again!”

“I’ll be right there,” Ivy said absently.

Ivy didn’t like Selina or Bruce Wayne as individuals,
but there was something attractive in the thought of them as a
couple—something besides her initial thought that Wayne might take her rival
out of the city permanently.

Still, that’s why she liked the idea. She
couldn’t fathom why any of the others would. Jonathan Crane and Victor
Frieze? Why would either of them give a damn?

Jonathan was shuddering after leaving The Mad Hatter’s
daintily well-appointed lair. The whole walk home it haunted him: the
napkins on the tea table were the same color as the carpet and Tetch’s
cummerbund. The cloth on the little accent table matched the curtains and
Tetch’s trousers. The miniature soufflé cups read “Eat me.” Jonathan dared
to hope whatever went into the cups would be poisoned, that maybe Mad Hatter
planned to capture Batman or Robin, hat them, and make them consume a
poisoned tea party.

At least Jervis saw it his way: the discovery of the
Bat-bug changed everything and Oswald had no vision. The discovery of the
Bat-bug changed everything, and Oswald simply wouldn’t see it.
All that fuss about Selina coming after them if they wrecked her wedding.
Maybe he had a point in the beginning, but now—now that they knew Batman
himself was against this—such an opportunity was before them, an opportunity
to strike at the Batman where he lived, simply by doing something they
wanted to do anyway.

If it came down to a He said/He said, with Scarecrow
and Jervis pointing at Batman and Batman pointing at Scarecrow and Jervis,
each side claiming the other was framing them, who would Selina believe?
Fellow Rogues who never took the slightest interest in her or the Caped
Cassanova who pursued her for years?

It was the most believable sort of lie in that it was
essentially true: Batman was the only reason they found the details of the
wedding. The list they started with only had one… only had one of the
businesses Selina was actually using for her wedding. The rest were all
dead… ends. If Oswald hadn’t found the Bat-bug… they’d be… they’d be
nowhere… It was only… only by… It was only by checking all the other
florists and… photographers… the, what do you call them, other caterers in
town, following the trail of Bat-breadcrumbs as it were… Jonathan blinked.
He’d reached his front door, but as he fumbled for his key, he lost his
train of thought. There was a distinct smell… misty, jungle, sultry, warm
and slightly sweet, most definitely… moist… He was uncomfortably warm, his
cheeks were burning under the mask, and the flush was moving sickeningly up
his face to his forehead. Little beads of sweat were forming along his brow
and in his hair. He blinked again…

And saw a lovely pair of cool, languid eyes gazing back
at him.

“Hello, Pamela. What a ravishing sight you are. I
fear you won’t believe me when I say you have never looked lovelier.”

Anthony Marcuso laughed. It started as a headshake as
he peeled hundred dollar bills off the roll to pay his check at Rao’s. It
warmed into a smile as he walked out the door and climbed the stairs to
street level. It bubbled into a chuckle as the limo pulled up to meet him
and erupted into a full laugh as he climbed into the back.

He was marrying a crazy woman, a real Arkham-class
crazy. She went down on their second date, they’d been screwing for more
than a year, she hits town for the wedding and all of a sudden she’s a born
again virgin. She taught him the knuckle-friction trick. Four trips
to Naples for Uncle Carmine, four unbelievable weekends with Italian whores,
and that blushing Catholic school girl showed him tricks he’d never seen.
Now he wasn’t allowed touch her until the wedding night. Un-believable.

That was nothing compared to her adorable Keystone
ideas about being followed. Anthony didn’t doubt that Joey the Bull taught
his daughter right about the FBI: always assume the phone is tapped, always
assume your picture’s being taken when you leave the house, and so on. But
that’s the Feds. Anthony didn’t know if that Flash faggot cared about the
Keystone Families, but if he did, a speedster freak from the Justice League
running around like a bright red ballerina couldn’t be that hard to spot.
Like the Feds with their 50s haircuts and crap suits, sitting in those boxy
Fords, who did they think they were fooling? But this was Gotham, and
Gotham meant Batman. The idea that cute Susanna Pelacci thought she’d know
if she was being followed ‘cause her daddy taught her what to look for—it
was too adorable for words. He was a lucky, lucky man.

Even if he wouldn’t be getting any until the wedding
night, unless he took Jimmy, Lee, and the Falcone twins up on that bachelor
night at Club Sugar.

Poison Ivy stumbled into her old hideout in Robinson
Park. She couldn’t face the greenhouse. Harley might be there. She
couldn’t look at Harley right now. She couldn’t look at anybody. She just
wanted to lean against a tree for a while until she could recover.

That was, without question, the most disgusting
greening ever. Jonathan Crane. Jonathan. Crane. Looking at her.
That glazed, adoring look in his eyes. And the shape of his mouth.
You could tell he was envisioning kissing her—EW!

Even greened, he creeped her out. Which he'd enjoy if
he knew, so Pamela Isley vowed to the tree—to its branches that stretched to
the heavens and its roots that sunk into the strong, enduring depth of
Mother Earth—that he would never, ever find out. She would spend a
few more minutes collecting herself, and after that, this whole affair would
be nothing but a straightforward business transaction. As if she’d slid a
bankcard card into an ATM to withdraw money, nothing more. That’s all she
had done, after all. Jonathan Crane had information that she wanted, she
inserted the sweet jungle mists into his nostrils and withdrew it. Perhaps
he, sad little man that he was, would remember it as something more, but
goddesses were above such thoughts.

The information is what mattered. A gang of them, a
sinister cabal of monstrous little men, deciding who Catty should be with
and overruling her choice—when Wayne was so devoted he could only manage a
Whitman Sampler for Poison Ivy herself in the grip of her pheromones?! It
was literally a crime against Nature. Who else but men—who else but low,
sniveling, flower-snipping men (Thank Gaia Harvey had nothing to do
with this)—would think that they could overrule Nature’s own dictates?

Clearly she had to put a stop to this. It was a
shame Selina was the heroine of this tender romance, but Ivy was beginning
to see it in more general terms. It wasn’t about Selina, it was an assault
on all women and the love they inspired that transcended even
pheromones. Not to mention who the villains were! (And thank Demeter,
Persephone and Antheia that Harvey wasn’t involved) Scarecrow, Mad Hatter,
Penguin and Freeze—and Batman! As if it shouldn’t occur to any
right-thinking villain that if Batman was against something, all of them
should be for it.

Idiot boys!

Well, it fell to the women, as always, to repair the
situation. After the men finished knocking things over with their penises,
it fell to a wise and knowing female to set things right again. If only
Selina wasn’t the heroine in all this. She’d never found out Ivy was the
one responsible for that “Catwoman Pregnant” story in The Gotham Post, and
Ivy did not want to risk a sequel. Stories about Selina had a way of taking
off like kudzu, and if her attempts to save the wedding were somehow
misunderstood… Quite apart from any new misunderstandings, Ivy didn’t
want her role in that old pregnancy story being discovered at this late
date… Kudzu… climbing, coiling, trailing kudzu… She needed some way to
ensure that if the kudzu started growing out of control like last time, it
would only grow in one predetermined direction…

Fiorellos did a much better job on Susanna’s hair this
time, and she was glad she was smart enough to schedule the practice runs.
With only one go at the hair salon and one fitting on the dresses, none of
her bridesmaids would turn out nearly as good. Drita would look okay, she
always did. But Maureen and Erin and Rita would all get that
straight-down-the-sides curl-in-at-the-bottom hairstyle the Gotham salons
seemed to give everyone from out of town. Susanna could only guess they did
it because they saw everyone from the Midwest as plump, and they had some
dumb idea about hiding their necks. Except it didn’t really, it just hid
their earrings. It didn’t frame their face in a flattering way, like
individuals, it was just the same dumb “Gotham stylist thinks I’m a Midwest
rube” haircut for everybody.

But not for her and not for Drita, that’s what Susanna
cared about. The other bridesmaids were forced on her by her mother to
match the groomsmen Mr. Falcone forced on Anthony. She didn’t care if they
looked plain and couldn’t get laid at the reception. She’d look all the
more beautiful standing next to a couple of dust mops.

Wayne Enterprises was the largest employer in Gotham,
and Bruce took that responsibility seriously. Much as he trusted Lucius, he
did not rubberstamp recommendations that could impact the livelihoods of so
many Gotham families. The analyses of the press response to his town halls,
the reaction to the GeoSeek and related technology rolled out at the Auto
Show, and the finance, marketing and product development strategies based on
that data all required his utmost attention. He was concentrating—which
he thought he’d made clear the last time Caroline buzzed him.

..:: Mr. Wayne? A Delinda Meter here to see you.
::..

“I said I’m not to be disturbed today,” Bruce growled
into the intercom.

..:: She has an appointment. Looks like a last
minute addition to your calendar, from Mr. Fox’s office. ::..

“Lucius sent her? Well, it must be important.
Alright, send her in.”

He cursed softly. Batman’s concerns were always his
priority—as they should be—and he had been focused on Batman’s activities
exclusively since getting back from the town hall tours. The result was
that now he had more catching up to do at the office. He was used to this
balancing act. Whenever one part of his life made greater demands, there
was a seesaw effect afterwards: more WayneTech, more Justice League, more
Foundation, more Gotham-based crimefighting, making up for lost time in
diminishing cycles until balance was once again achieved…

He heard the door open and, as he stood up to greet his
visitor, he mentally added “All I need is a few less interruptions when I
get back to the—IVY!”

“Oh I get it, D. Meter,” Bruce announced foppishly.
He should have caught it, if his focus was where it should be.

“I’m so sorry to interrupt; I know you’re very busy,”
she said in that offhand way that implies just the opposite. “I didn’t want
to come to the house with something like this. Selina, you know. But I had
to see you in person. Warn you. It’s the most terrible thing that’s
happened.”

Bruce split his focus into thirds: the first monitored
his expression and reactions with an eye to preserving his identity. The
second observed his pulse, body temperature and libido for any alteration.
The third tried to remember the last time he dosed with anti-tox and
calculate if there would be any trace immunity left in his syst… Did she say
she came to warn him?

“Scarecrow, Mad Hatter, Mr. Freeze, I don’t even know
how many others. All dead set against this idea of you and Selina getting
married and determined to wreck the wedding. But I don’t want you to worry,
because I’m on it.”

Bruce had been greened. He’d been subjected to fear
toxin, hatting, and Freeze’s ice ray. The ripple-waves of numbing shock
that pulsed through him now most resembled the latter. His entire brain
flash-frozen, with tiny little heat centers continuing to fire, a few
synapses at a time, until at last a clear thought was able to burst
through….

Selina and I are… WHAT?

“So monstrously unfair, just because nobody is ever
going to care about them, the rest of us aren’t allowed to have any blooms
in our garden…”

And POISON IVY is telling me this?

“Someone downright freaky like Hugo or Scarecrow, well,
what can you expect…”

She’s telling BRUCE WAYNE this?

“Absolutely convinced, due to their own insecurities,
that people like us aren’t ‘allowed’ to be like normal people…”

She’s not trying to green me or kidnap me (so far,
at least) and she wants to HELP?

“Probably true if their definition of ‘normal’ were to
be known…”

She’s warning me, warning me about the other Rogues
trying to break up a wedding that isn’t happening…

“I mean what can you say, the man’s a living weed.”

And she thinks she’s telling this to Billionaire
Bruce Wayne the groom… who she has greened previously, successfully and not,
but… Selina… marriage… ‘Don’t worry, I’m on it’… and… and… SOMEHOW I DID
NOT KNOW ANY OF THIS WAS GOING ON UNTIL RIGHT NOW.

“…actually gave me potpourri for Christmas. I mean
really, the severed heads of dead flowers. It’s not like my affection for
plants is a big secret. Who can’t see how monstrously rude that is?”

AND I’M BATMAN!

“…but I have strayed dreadfully off the topic. Like I
was saying…”

I’m BATMAN.

“About Batman.”

I’m…

“Excuse me,” Bruce managed, feeling his back and legs
sinking deeper into the chair and hoping against hope that the fop voice was
still engaged.

“Batman,” Ivy said with a sympathetic poke at his
sleeve. “If you had any experience with these whackos, you’d understand:
you always have to have a contingency plan. On the off chance that
something gets by me, some of them—Scarecrow and Hatter in particular—may
try to pin the wedding destruction on Batman. And I was just saying that,
if I were you, I would let that stand. Because Selina won’t be too happy,
and if she’s going to tear somebody's throat out, it may as well be his.”